Porridge

TWO POEMS – Jim Lloyd

Peregrine has put them up;
one, against one thousand. They
need eyes in the back of their head.
His eyes, forwards only, burning
on the brown-gold and white
pulsating flock.

ONE POEM – Clare Starling

And here I am, unsure of my value
Crushing myself through the doors
Ice and dirt crumbling from me
Leaving meltwater on the mat

ONE POEM – Elizabeth Gibson

like you are the aurora borealis, a thirsty balloon,
wanting and worthy of more air, ready to gorge
on forest fruits, and salt and garlic, and cinnamon,
like you are every season and its harvest

ONE POEM – Eugene Ryan

Our joke ran
that I would hand him the ladybird kite,
him in his little black windbreaker,
and I’d plead with him to hold on,
and he’d smile like all the world wasn’t enough,

ONE POEM – Gaynor Kane

My weight is
three black labradors lazing

a mummy moon bear
or a black and white ostrich

The Season of Dying Birds — Harriet Sandilands

In the courtyard, at the entrance to the bookshop, an egg smashed on the cobbled ground – albumen, yolk and the bald outline and bulging eye of an almost-bird.

ONE POEM – D. Parker

stick your worm-like head
to the surface of muddy waters
will yourself into existence

TWO POEMS – John Kefala Kerr

I grab the deck rail,
expecting a disturbance
—a pitching and yawing—

but the ferry glides smoothly
over the sea’s fleecy crimp,
like a brush through kid fibre.

ONE POEM – Andrej Bilovsky

They don’t make
houses pink and white
like coconut ice-cream.
They’re always plain, dull colors.
It’s all so easy
when it should be exhilarating.

ONE POEM – Ben Nardolilli

The body wants to do the dropout boogie,
a way to just slowly spiral out
of reality and not include my self with its accessories

TWO POEMS – Adam Stokell

I see the cat before the cat sees me.
White with black splotches, a longhair.

Leaving the law behind it,
stealing easily as light fails

ONE POEM – Andrew Button

Everybody called her ‘a character’,
a regular in the library
in her shabby Barbour jacket
and crumpled hat perched
on hair dishevelled as a bird’s nest.

ONE POEM – Paul Brucker

When I bent down to give her a kiss,
she quacked

Then exploded with loud report
into hundreds of pieces.

There is an unspoken rule in a therapy group that you are not going to go out for a beer afterwards. It’s the same way that no-one actually tells you that you shouldn’t have sex with someone you just met on the third day of a meditation retreat, but you still know it isn’t a very good idea.

Porridge Books of the Year 2022

Discover the books that the Porridge team enjoyed reading this year.

After Midnight: Nightclub Photographs from the ‘50s and ‘60s – David Ford

In boxes of old photographs, you sometimes come across nightclub pictures from the 1950s and 1960s. These images sit at the boundary between the public and private, the posed portrait and the casual snapshot. They were taken by ‘snappers’ who worked in the nightclubs, taking pictures of couples and groups of adults enjoying themselves which…

FLASH FICTION — Hibah Shabkhez

They do not know that the sun terrifies me.

A Love Letter To Twitter – Danny Bate

At time of writing, the infamous bird app, Twitter, is going through a rough patch. For those of you who are enviably unaware, the platform recently gained a new owner, whose grand designs for his acquisition are still being revealed to everyone, apparently even to the man himself. The site currently has an ‘end of…

Anti-Concretism and Architectural Atheism: In Defence of Brutalism – Tom Jones

The pro- and anti-Brutalist building camps can be defined in two words apiece. There are those who believe such buildings are ‘concrete poetry’, and there are those who believe that each one is a ‘concrete monstrosity’. Like the battlefields of WW1, there is nothing living in between. Brutalism’s tenure at the forefront of architecture was…

Cures For The Common Cold — Sarah de Souza

Thinking about this, they grow wide-eyed and speak so fast that the windows become flecked with child spittle. How can they have made themselves so ridiculous by dreaming?

COMFORT FOODS // Mediterranean Diet — Natalie D.C.

come inside! we’ve got so much to show you! over there you’ll find a mosaic-laden platter of figs, dates, & grapes, little green & purple appetizers like bougainvillea petals against a vine-entangled fence.

Kaleidoscope — Jenna Clake

The horoscope said: You are a fish. You will come to understand this. She found this funny because it seemed like something more suitable for a fortune cookie, and because she had once had a boyfriend who, during arguments, told her that she kissed like a koi carp.

Favorite Recipes – Ann Levin

I can still see her today. Tall, blond, and statuesque, a platinum-haired goddess with perfect teeth and a year-round tan. She was standing in the middle of the dance floor at my parents’ annual Christmas party – except it wasn’t really a dance floor. It was the dining room of our house, but with all…

ONE POEM – Daniel Hinds

Hooves leave a hard imprint, a dark wet mark.

Hoof-clop like the noise your tongue makes

When it leaves the roof of your mouth.

ONE POEM – Siobhan Ward

Its big head, glassy stare
and halting hobble
from random ewe to ewe
made me think of you –

TWO POEMS – DS Maolalai

they sit on the bridge. they cluster
as close as the round bulbs
of road-swollen blackberries,
dusty with travel.

ONE POEM – Olivia Heggarty

Cutting my hair with the meat scissors,
being told off for not using a hairdresser,
explaining that if I don’t change something

often I will do something worse

Metaphor, Make-believe and Misleading Information in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – Charley Barnes

‘Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.’ (84) In definition of genre, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) has a wingspan that ranges fiction, nonfiction, and the ambiguous nonfiction novel. In definition of content, it is both a book with ‘dramatic power’ that warrants ‘honorary…

ONE POEM – Amanda Huggins

we revered those rake-limbed lads
on the slot machines
as though they were gods,
not fishermen’s lads.

ONE POEM – Srinjay Chakravarti

It will not miss
a trick—
or treat.
Its bulging eyeballs
on a roll,
it makes an advance
and then stops.

Three from Color Wheel — Salvatore Difalco

Underscoring the onset of nausea on the pier, feelings of self-loathing
also bubble up to the surface. “I get seasick in the bathtub, man,”
declares a ponytailed dude in Plymouth pink.

Radio Music Magic – Paul Sasges

Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…

Good and Beautiful — Laura Eppinger

Henri is at least good for catching the scent of socio-political turmoil in the air.

My Mother’s Quilt – Clare Reddaway

This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…

TWO POEMS – Janet McCann

Something Lives Something lives in the crawl spaceAbove my room. A bird? Maybe a rat?Sometimes it seems to be shaking out its feathers.But then there’s a scrabbling overheadAnd the squares of insulation quiver. I’m not afraid of you, I tell the shaking panels.We all have the right to be.And I will not pursue you with…

Tea for a Pandemic – Terry Kirts

1. My grandmother was a kitchen singer, an apron wearer who trilled the rs and drew out the tra-la-las in all the old songs while she kneaded bread dough or blanched tomatoes. Some days growing up, I spent more time in her windswept farmhouse outside of town than I did in my own home, my…

ONE POEM – Constance von Igel

Brazil has 27 administrative regions, and we found
The strongest evidence of your ancestry,
In the following 10 regions.

ONE POEM – Sofia Lyall

I find the roots of an oak (dead, upturned, twisted)
and am left more disoriented than before.

Roses in the Attic: Ruminations on Moving Back Home – Abby Connolly

It had almost been a year. This night, a year ago, was when I had had to come back. The realisation was a rock in my gut that nauseously listed every now and then to the side, keeping me awake. It was the sensation of motion in the deprivation-tank stillness of night that displaced me…